In addition to announcing that more CaBi stations were to be installed soon, DDOT had announcements about other project progress at last week's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting.

They have issued an RFQ for a study on a north-south cycletrack from Florida Avenue in Shaw to Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown. They're looking for a route on one of the roads between 5th and 9th, NW and the study will help to determine which road is the best for that. MoveDC has cycletracks on 5th and 6th.

DDOT kicked off Phase 2 of the design of the next section of the Metropolitan Branch Trail last week. This is the section between Bates Road (a.k.a. Big Stinky) and the Takoma Metro. NPS, which controls much of the land the trail will be built on, has agreed to proceed to the design phase and Toole Design Group has been hired to design the trail segment.

DDOT is scoping a project to resurface the Suitland Parkway Trail. Complete reconstruction of the trail is being included in the Douglass Bridge replacement project with a timeline for completion in the 2018-19 time frame.

The 30% design of the Oxon Run Trail rebuild is done, with full design starting soon.

The South Capitol Street Trail project will need to move a wall at Bolling Air Force base in order to be built to the standard that DDOT wants. That's being negotiated.

DDOT is currently resurfacing the South Dakota Avenue NE sidepath from Bladensburg Road to the new Costco. They'd also like to improve biking on V Street NE if they can too.

It moved several projects from "Ready to go" to "Installed Lanes" (M Street NW, 1st Street NE, 13th St NW, G and I NE, New Hampshire Ave NW, Piney Branch Road/13th Streeet and Washington Avenue SW) and there are also now sharrows on Ft. Totten Drive NE.

Several other projects moved up to "Ready to Go" including 49th St NE, Galveston St SW, Harewood Rd. NE, MLK SE, and Malcolm X Ave.

A new bike lane project on 2nd Street SE between East Cap and Independence is listed as "In Design" as is a side path on 2nd NE btween F and L, a bike lane on 19th St from Potomac Ave SE to Benning Road NE, and a cycle track on M Street NE between 1st and Delaware.

DDOT is going to pull the zebras out of the street and install new barriers called park-its, which are twice as long as zebras and four inches high, all along the cycle track from Constitution Avenue to 15th Street NW.

The MoveDC Multi-Modal Long-Range Transportation Plan for DC was released last week, and what can I say except that it's a pretty Big F&**ing Deal. It's not much of a surprise, since it doesn't depart that much from the draft version last November, but it's good news to see a transportation plan from the District be so ambitious with respect to cycling.

I've seen and heard a lot of pessimistic comments about DDOT's ability to follow through on a plan, and there is reason to be skeptical (see: the DDOT Action Agenda), but if you look through the status report on the 2005 Bicycle Master Plan, they've hit quite a few of their targets. Not all of course, and we can argue about whether or not that ambitious enough, but still real progress has been made. And some things that were not in the plan, like bikesharing, have been picked up as well.

The bicycle element of the plan doesn't diverge much, if at all, from what was included in the draft version in November. It also makes a note that it serves as an update to the 2005 Bicycle Master Plan, an update that was much needed. One recurrent theme of the update is more, more, more. More bike facilities, more bike sharing, more parking etc...The bike network of trails, cycletracks and bike lanes will be expanded by nearly 200% to a total of 343 miles over the next 25 years.

All infrastructure projects are placed in one of four tiers, and some items above are Tier 4.

The proposed bike facilities maps are pretty intense. As I said in November, it's hard to think of anything they missed. I try to imagine how much people would have freaked out in 2005 if they had proposed this, but one notable thing about this plan is that, thus far, there has been little to no freaking out. The section EOTR of the river looks a lot like my fantasy map, in fact. My entire 4 mile bike commute would be on bike facilities. That seemed unbelievable not so long ago.

Most of the cycletracks are focused in the L'Enfant city, while new bike lanes and trails are more in the outer wards, which makes sense to me.

There are other recommendations about enforcing bike parking regulations; improving difficult intersections like "Dave Thomas", Tenley and L'Enfant Circles; improving accommodations for cyclists in barrier areas like the U.S. Capital Complex; improved crash reporting, training and planning policies; allowing cyclists in some dedicated transit lanes;

The one thing I'm disappointed in (based on a cursory reading only) is that recommendation C.7 which recommends encouraging DC employees to bike commute does not mention the bicycle commuter benefit, which DC employees inexplicably still can not take advantage of.

DDOT has a survey on the MoveDC site about the plan. You should definitely participate in that.

I usually call these a Copenhagen left, but that might sound too-European. DDOT says that they have an existing one on L St & 15th St NW, but will be installing three more as part of the M St protected bike lane.

On bike to work day tomorrow, the NoMa BID will operate a pit stop from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. on the grassy lot at Pierce and First Streets, NE, just across from the new cycle track.

Immediately following (and weather permitting) at the same location, Mayor Vincent C. Gray, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Executive Director Lionell Thomas, and other dignitaries will enjoy cake, champagne and a brief ceremony at 10 AM, and cut the ribbon on the new First Street, NE project. At 10:30 AM, Mayor Gray will walk north to 1200 First Street, NE and cut a ribbon on a new sculpture.

DCist has a nice post on it here. I went, but haven't had time to post on it, but you should submit comments to DDOT via their survey here by April 15th (just do it now I say).

On thing to note is that the MoveDC plan shows Florida Avenue as a high capacity transit corridor with no bike facilities, so how this will meld with that is a good question. If MoveDc is just being ignored, that's not a good thing, even though I like the idea of bike lanes and cycletracks in this area.